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Learning the truth
about our history will help us transform our indoctrinated thinking. It is
imperative for us to know who we are and who we were — a deeply spiritual
people intimately connected to our ancestors, mind, body and spirit. “If you
don’t know where you come from, you won’t know where you’re going!
Tiana Ferrell, Publisher Atlanta Free Speech

Dr. Eugene
Stovall
Oakland, California

We must
look to our history to lift Black people from the intellectually deficient,
economically depressed and morally degraded status that we find ourselves in.
And it is fortunate that February is dedicated to the study and analysis of
Black History. But we must squander that
this opportunity to study our past by confirming the same misconceptions, half
truths and outright lies that have been promoted for years. Black people need to
be willing to analyze everything we think we know. We must apply rigid critical
thinking skills and careful analysis in a way that helps us discover how we got
to where we are and how to get to where we should be. Of course, those who are
happy with the state of black people will want our history to read in the
future exactly as it does now. However for those of us concerned with mass
incarcerations, lack of unemployment opportunities, voter suppression and an
indolent and self-satisfied black leadership, our black history must be given a
closer collective scrutiny. The effort must be collective for a number of
reasons, not the least of which is that academic black studies departments have
failed to produce the scholarship needed to assist our community in its
struggles to gain equity and access. Tragically,
some black scholars are still repeating Melville Herskovits’ fabrications about
Africans and the slave trade while ignoring Gunnar Myrdal’s prescriptions for
dramatically reducing the “negro” population of the United States ___
prescriptions that were produced in the 20th century that are still
being applied in the 21st. So during this month, we need to be about debunking the
myths and misconceptions that have been passed off as black history.

One
misconception that is held by an overwhelming majority of black people is that
Barack Obama is the first black man to be elected President of the United
States. It is not clear why this myth is being sustained by general agreement among
black political, academic and civil rights leaders. But there is ample evidence
from white and black scholars to the contrary. The black historian, J.A. Rogers
produced a pamphlet, The Five Negro
Presidents, in which he names four presidents of the United States who had
African-American ancestry. Auset BaKhufu also published the book, The Six Black Presidents, in which he
names five presidents of the United States, as well as one vice-president who had
African-American blood. However, since neither J.A. Rogers nor Auset BaKhufu have
any intellectual standing in the white or African-American communities, their
findings have not taken seriously. However, in 1968, Francis Russell, a prize
winning white writer with several credits, wrote the book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding and His Times that was
vetted and published by McGraw-Hill and that produced evidence that Warren
Harding indeed was a black man. Furthermore, even though Francis Russell became
embroiled in a lawsuit with the Harding family, his contention that Harding was
known as a Negro in his hometown of Blooming Grove was never disputed. So Barack
Obama is not the first black man elected president of the United States. And these
two Negroes will also be known in history as being the two American presidents
to make multi-million dollar gifts from the US treasury to white corporations. Let’s
look at another oversight in black history that needs even closer scrutiny.